For now, these pictures all link back to the original post on Blogger, and the photos there link to enlargements. I’ll have these hosted elsewhere soon, and reinsert them here via hotlink, so you won’t have to deal with Blogger.

Ok, I’m still not sleepy, just tired. Day three pics are from Saturday. We did St. Paul’s, The Globe Theatre, The Sherlock Holmes Museum, Kensington Palace (no photography allowed inside), Kensington Gardens, and Leicester Square.

Since the pics already exist on Blogger, just click the above picture. It will take you to this post as it existed on blogger, and from there you can see all 21 pictures, and clicking them there will take you to enlarged versions.

Once I have the pictures hosted elsewhere, I’ll come back and add them here via hotlink.

The Tower of London, The College of Arms, The Tower Bridge, sundry other London pics.

Since the pics already exist on Blogger, just click the above picture. It will take you to this post as it existed on blogger, and from there you can see all 17 pictures, and clicking them there will take you to enlarged versions.

Once I have the pictures hosted elsewhere, I’ll come back and add them here via hotlink.

There really isn’t any good, quick way for me to organize these, so I’m just going to post the best of our pics in the order we took them.

This is the Wellington Arch, for a comparison from last year. The weather was very fickle this year. It never really got very warm, but it was sunny and comfortable, then cloudy, then pouring rain, then sunny again… all week.

Since the pics already exist on Blogger, just click the above picture. It will take you to this post as it existed on blogger, and from there you can see all 7 pictures, and clicking them there will take you to enlarged versions.

Once I have the pictures hosted elsewhere, I’ll come back and add them here via hotlink.

Thanks for your patience regarding our move to WordPress.

Kisses, JanieBelle

This is the Statue of Queen Victoria out front of Buckingham Palace.

This is pretty cool shot of some old building. I did some experimenting this year with lighting and perspective. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Such is life.

We’re home. We’ve got about 1500 stills and several hours of video to go through. We even managed to get a few seconds of video of the ceiling of St. Paul’s Cathedral just for Lifewish before the security guy started towards us.
It ain’t much, and I did what I could to pretend I was just rooting around in the camcorder bag, but I don’t think he was buying it. He just stuck really close to us for the rest of our time in there, so I couldn’t sneak any more shots. Kate tried a little flirtation distraction, but apparently he was highly skilled at resisting the temptations of the flesh. It’s hard to point a camcorder while it’s still in the bag and a security guard is five or ten yards away. We were in the whispering gallery at the time, so we couldn’t really do much planning, either. Sorry, best we could do, we ain’t James Bonds you know. It really is beautiful in there.

There were a ton of security guys and priests or whatever in Westminster Abbey, so we couldn’t manage anything at all in there. They don’t even have postcards or anything with pictures of the graves or the effigies or the archetecture that you can buy! Respect for the dead is one thing, but that’s silly. It’s not like there was a service going on or anything. Are they considering that a “Graven Image”? Sorry, bad pun. I’m still tired and couldn’t resist. But it bugs me that they won’t allow photos in those places, or at least let you buy postcards of photos. Seems rather selfish to me.

We’ve got a ton to tell you all about, too. Our last night in London, we went to the reconstructed Globe Theatre to see “A Comedy of Errors”. I think I can safely say that you’ve never seen Shakespeare until you’ve stood on the floor of the Globe as a plebe and watched Shakespeare. It couldn’t have been any better. We even got a little rain shower, which oddly enough was wonderful.

The nightmare began about the time we made it through the BAA searches and stuff at Heathrow. BAA was efficient and thorough. After that, American Airlines took over and turned our travel home into what Kate calls “a clusterfuck”. I think that’s an undeservedly generous description. After they got our plane off the ground an hour and a half late, we missed the connection in Chicago (only American Airlines would route us from London to Chicago to go to Philadelphia!). They destroyed our brand new (albeit cheap, I admit) luggage, and we wound up sitting in O’Hare for about 8 hours, because the next flight to Philadelphia was booked solid. The plane we eventually got took off over an hour late and when we finally got where we were going, the luggage (or what was left of it) took another hour to make it to the baggage pickup. Next time, I’ll take Dad up on the offer to spend a little extra and fly British Airways. American Airlines tried to blame it all on the terrorist crap, but they seemed to be the only airline, foreign or domestic that was experiencing difficulties. I wonder how long they’ll be able to milk that excuse.

Just to top it off, the car battery was dead when we got to the parking lot. Apparently somebody managed to get the car door partially open, the alarm went off, they closed the car back up (nothing missing, we didn’t leave anything in it to take and I don’t think he got it all the way open), and the car alarm went off until the battery gave out. Nice. Philthadelphia, the City of Brotherly Shove. What really pisses me off is that we were parked less than 100 yards from the guard shack.

Off course, with all that time gone, we didn’t get to stay and visit with family and friends there, so we just got the jump (at least the airport did that for free…I gave the guy a five pound bill as a souvenir since he wouldn’t take a tip), hopped in, and drove straight back to Jacksonville. We made it back about 11 this morning, took a bath together for about an hour, and then went to sleep.

So we’ve been pretty busy, and not had a great deal of time to do much blogging.
So whilst Davison was sneaking his perversions onto the board, and blipey and DaveScot have been digitally haranguing each other, here’s what we’ve been doing.

We’ve been to the Tower of London, St. Paul’s, the Natural History Museum, and some other touristy kinds of things.

I bought Kate this beautiful hand-made necklace and bracelet from the artisan in Covent Garden.

But our favorite stop so far was Westminster Abbey. I’ve seen the memorial and burial stone of Isaac Newton. Also buried nearby are Faraday and another scientist who’s name escapes me just now…(I overslept and my brain isn’t in gear yet, give me a break.)

But most interesting and cool in terms of our blog here, we have touched the white marble stone beneath which lie the remains of Charles Darwin. It was strange to think of a man beneath there, given that he has become so much larger than life in the argument of religion vs. evolution.

It was also odd in a more tangible way. Most of the grave stones in the floor of Westminster Abbey are black. A very few it seems, are white, and his was one of those. It’s off in a corner, near the last bit of the tour before you leave, and several scientists, including Faraday, Newton, and Darwin are all buried close together. Sort of a “scientists corner” like the poets corner.